This week: rainy mornings, family updates, Swiggy’s Instamart, house plans, comics, a Japanese movie recommendation, and software exploration.

For folks not in the know, this is a weekly stream of consciousness zero-agenda “here’s what’s happening” or “here’s what’s interesting” post.

What’s been happening

• I woke up to the rains today. It’s just such a fantastic way to wake up during the weekend. The smell of rain is brilliant, and even as I’m writing this, it’s raining outside, and the white noise is just amazing for focus.
• My uncle (who has a bit of dementia now) has come back from the US to his house here. It’s amazing how much of a difference familiar surroundings and proper care make, because he seems so much better now. Also: proper healthcare because while he had to wait months to get psychiatric evaluation in the US, out here he got access to a specialized geriatric psychiatrist immediately who changed and tuned his medication. The official diagnosis is Korsakoff syndrome caused by alcohol abuse (my uncle has always been a functional alcoholic) plus drug induced parkisonism (this was caused by the drug prescription in the US). He’s mostly recovered from his Parkinson disease symptoms, and that’s made a world of a difference.
• Swiggy’s Instamart coverage is exemplary across Thiruvananthapuram. You can get most simple groceries and medicines delivered in less than 15 minutes from pretty much anywhere across the city. It’s amazing that the unique dynamics of India: cheap labour + a thriving startup ecosystem has created an environment quite unlike anywhere else in the world: you can get anything delivered from anywhere, pretty much for less than a dollar cost of labour. I wonder how long this will last? Is this another VC-money backed boom waiting for a bust? And what’s good for the customer isn’t necessarily good for the delivery worker: my friend Aju has a very interesting podcast series called Delivery Charge about the delivery workers’ plight.

• We had another discussion with the architects this week and finalized more details of the house. The next step is apparently something called a “3D layout” where we’ll be able to see more of the house and its interiors by walking around it. That should be ready in about a month. I was thinking of registering the land this month, but because of heavy rains here, land development has stalled quite a bit and the developer themselves aren’t sure when it’ll be up and going again.

• Prema girl bought me a comic book from Sweden when she came by this time. I miss having comic stores around, they were a fixture when I was studying in London, and I used to visit them at least a couple times a month. It’s great to have friends who really grok you.

• We watched Perfect Days on MUBI this week. Such a lovely movie. The main protagonist is an exemplar for “living in the moment”, and I loved how Japanese the movie is. I think unlike K-Dramas, Japanese movies really portray both the positives of the culture (the work ethic, kaizen, habitual routines and cleanliness) and the negatives (the subtle and unsubtle class distinctions that reminds me of caste more than class, the loneliness, and the ostracism that comes with choosing a different way of life). Do watch when you get time! Ammu & I have made a resolution to watch more MUBI movies after this.

• Ammu & I also really loved the music in the movie. We shazamed two songs: Perfect day by Lou Reed and Feeling Good by Nina Simone.

• Our scan is on the 19th (this Friday). Both of us have a bit of underlying worry about this, but trying to stay positive.

• Like I mentioned last week, I tried Alacritty, Neovim and Emacs this week but went back to Visual Studio Code. One practical reason: I use the debugger quite a bit and the debugging experience with Neovim is still a bit subpar. But more fundamentally, I also rediscovered what I didn’t like about the Vim/Emacs experience: modal editing. I think I may come back to it in the future though. Of the lot, Emacs looked more promising. I did find some keyboard shortcuts super powerful and fuzzy searching speedy and useful, and learnt from them to customize my VS Code experience a lot more. In particular, switching between bookmarks in code, switching between the terminal, code, file tree and debug views, and toggling between bookmarks in code to navigate around faster. Maybe one of these days I’ll write more about how I’ve customized my VS Code.

Links of the Week

• I’ve been using a split keyboard for quite some time now (it’s the Microsoft Kinesis Freestyle 2 Mac with the tenting accessory), but the Dygma Defy just looks amazing.
• I really liked how this article approaches predicting future AI performance by evaluating order of magnitude (OOM) advances, and estimating how long it’ll take.
• So the Indians didn’t invent zero after all? File under: there is always prior art.

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